welcome! jeremy freese is a professor in sociology at northwestern university. he finds blogging to be a good diversion from insomnia and a far better use of time than television.

Friday, November 12, 2004

Kalahari Comments: open spaces, casual places

Dispatch from Nina:

It is my tremendous good fortune [sic] to be writing this from the Kalahari Resort at the Wisconsin Dells. [I am attending a State Bar Board of Directors meeting here.] I find it an educational moment in my continued learning about the American Way. I can’t quite disclose the nature of our executive discussions (what, you think I’m blogging while the meeting is in progress? How crass!) but I can reflect on several things that seem JFW-appropriate.

First a question: why is everything so vast in this country? You could house a four-generation Polish family in the hall I had to traverse to get from the front door to the conference room. And the entrance itself: wow! Is this the gateway to the Great Pyramids or is it the driveway to a little bitty water park resort?

Secondly: what is the Wisconsin dress code anyway? I am confused. True, lawyers tend to dress up. Men law profs wear ties, soc profs, I am guessing, tend to dispense with neckwear (yes, I know, I need look no further than my own back yard to run into an exception to this). But for meetings of this type, at a Water Park Resort, was I wrong to take it a step down? I am in casual slacks (okay, call them what they are – corduroy pants, though with the nicest cut!) with my best black sweater and très French scarf. I left my swim suit at home, water park notwithstanding. Judging by the attire around me, I think I made the right decision.

But help me here: where are we at with clothes these days? In Poland, there is little diversity: city people dress in city ways and country people try to dress in city ways. Here, I’m stumped. I was told recently that you can tell someone is from Wisconsin if they are wearing cut offs and a parka. Surely that’s not the expectation though, is it?

17 comments:

Most Statistas wear those cheese-head things that you see at the Packer's games - women in the Dells often wear a petite lace glove on the left hand for social affairs, indicating that they are urban folk rather than rural and do not milk cows. Such snobbery and class conflict grew serious in the 1950s until finally for social outings rural women would put a brown stain on their lace gloves, signifying cow poop and being in direct contact with their source of income. This tradition continues today, as you may have already noted. Some Sociology Grad students, attempting to be Marxist in their theoretical orientations, wear a brown stained left lace glove - but one handshake shows they have no gripping strength and are connected to real working people on paper only. Their solidarity with the working class is indeed best signified by cow poop.

I tremble to follow Anon #2 with an earnest response, but my sense is that there is no dress code, but rather a panoply of dress codes for various professionally- and/or culturally-delineated groups.

For example, my junior colleagues mostly wear jeans except when clients are in the office ("No Jeans Day" is preannounced at reception); the Ph.D. holders opt for the casual end of business casual -- it takes a lot to bring out the ties -- and I don't even own a pair of jeans.

In Washington, where dress codes have been giving way to the summer humidity, U.S. Postal Service HQ was one of the last bastions of business dress, but the previous Postmaster General relaxed the business-formal code there one particularly brutal D.C. summer and that was all she wrote. A couple of our more traditionally-minded contacts there do still opt for seersucker suits in the summer, voluntarily.

On a related note, Susan Lindeborg (do you know her from her L'Etoile days?) used to give us grief if we dressed down for dinner when she was cooking at the Morrison-Clark Inn (which has a rather formal Victorian dining room). Her Majestic Cafe in Alexandria is pretty casual.

I was a bit surprised at one of the opening week concerts at Overture Hall to find that my Lyric Opera matinee uniform (blazer over turtleneck with wool trousers) left me a bit under-dressed. I guess that won't be the case by next symphony season.

Thanks, Tom. I have to admit that I had some trepidation about posting on JFW with open comments. I'm 51 years old, which puts me in the privileged position of not getting much of a rise out of the word "poop." I am always amused how many times commentators get a titter from typing this and other similar such concepts onto a blog.

It's so amusing to hear that radicals have fashion dos and don'ts. Do we permit the wearing of a red bandana? Or do we run into problems there now that we have red states? And I suppose women must never wear pink because it's too feminine in the old way, and men should avoid pastels, and black pants are de rigueur and and.. come on, educate me! In Europe men love the informal, gorgeous artistry of ties (with rolled up shirt sleeves and a tailored pants -- sexy!), so I'm interested on how Things Are Viewed here.

Please don't laugh at the horrendous circumstances that produce feral children. Sociology students above all should have at least a sense of compassion for the dynamics that produce them. There have been no documented reports of these poor souls in Wisconsin. The closest and last known incident in the US occured in 1934 in the Masabi iron range of Minnesota. Little Petra the pig eater, as the Masabi folks called her, did not live long once she was apprehended. But since many are here for cheap thrills only, I am not going to disclose any more about her in this blog. I will say, and I mean no offense to Nina and the Poles, that her homeland has the highest documented incidents of feral children on the planet. One can run from the cold hard truth, but not hide, but since she is one of Freese's pals, I won't elaborate any further on that subject either.

Lonely Donut Man: The JFW editorial board is currently entertaining requests for you as a guest poster. You'd have to write posts about loneliness and donuts, preferably touching on both in each post and doing so poignantly.